


Grandfather's Footsteps

by Dancing_Phalangess



Category: House M.D.
Genre: But seriously though on angst, By which I mean House pokes her with a stick, Complete, F/M, House is a jerk, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Nothing more to see here, One Shot, Trigger warning for past abuse, a little hurt/comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-16 22:35:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8120122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dancing_Phalangess/pseuds/Dancing_Phalangess
Summary: A throwaway comment from House pushes Cameron into the rabbit hole.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I know I'm late to the party but I can't let go.

"Cameron, go give Grandpa a kiss goodbye- and make it a good one."

The coffee turns to a sludge, glues in her throat. "What?" she manages to choke out.

House rolls his eyes. "You. Grandpa. Bit of tongue action. Give the poor guy one last moment in heaven before his damned to an eternity of nothing." He tosses his cane in the air and catches it before it crashes back onto his desk.

Cameron draws a slow, quiet breath, trying to calm herself down without even him noticing there's a burning poker pressing against her chest. It doesn't work. It's too hot in there, too hot under everyone's gazes. Chase and Foreman are both staring at her now, waiting for her to snap something back. Maybe challenge House to do it himself if he's that concerned. But she says nothing.

Her voice is trapped, like...like...

"Fine." House flips the cane again. "If you're not game I'll get Wilson to do it. I always have wondered about him."

Just like that she's off the hook.

Without another glance at her, Foreman rolls his eyes and strolls out and Chase fixes her with another of his puppy looks before he follows him.

Cameron uses the table to push herself to her feet too, but she's off balance and can't trust herself to let go immediately. When she does, she finds House's cane slapped in the way of her exit. "What is it?" she says without bothering to keep the irritation out of her voice. It's not like he ever tries with her.

"Wow, we must be psychic. That's exactly what I was going to ask you!"

"What are you talking about, House?" She really, really just wants to get away from him and back to work. Back to a different patient. Put in some hours in the clinic maybe, or in A&E.

House lowers his cane, but continues to stare at her. "It's just I thought you'd jump at the chance to give it up to some poor dying guy."

It's a stab followed by a kick. She sees it register on his face too, exactly what he's just said, and she takes a small spark of satisfaction in watching the gleam vanish from his eyes. It's even more satisfying to snarl: "Screw you, House," and sweep past him.

~*~

She's just pulling her coat out out of her locker when hands grip her waist and Chase dips his mouth towards her neck. She freezes, her muscles snapping so tight that they ache.  
"What's wrong?" he mumbles into her shoulder without letting go.

Move, she wills herself, but she can't even open her mouth to tell him to get the fuck off of her.

"No one's going to walk in, I jammed the door."

No. no, no, no. His hands are underneath her waistband, moving to the front, coming out again just to unclip the button of her pants and...

"No!" It comes out of her mouth that time and she finally had the strength to wrench herself away from him. She spins around, her fist raised, wanting to knock his teeth out, claw his eyes, anything, everything to get away. "Don't touch me."

Chase is backing away, his hands in the air like she's waving a gun. "All right. Jesus." He looks at her like she's a pile of something sticky on his seat. Then he hesitates, his scowl falls. "You okay?" he asks, reluctantly. He looks very much like he wants to either run away or hit something, but he doesn't make a move.

So Cameron does. Without answering him, she dashes past, yanking open the door like she's running away from the monster under the bed. She ignores Chase calling after her; ignores, even, the looks she gets from everyone else as she tears past them. The bathroom door bangs shut behind her and she drops beside the toilet in time to throw her lunch up. She coughs, retching and gasping. It's not just her throat that's burning, but her chest, her lungs, her blood.

She slumps against the toilet, tears scorching her cheeks. She isn't supposed to feel like this. Not now. But she feels like there's sludge in her veins instead of blood and her throat is so tight she can only breathe in strangled gasps. She claws at the wall, as if that will give her release, oxygen, and then her hands turn on herself, digging hard into the flesh on her arms.

Relief is instant and flooding. She's a doctor, it's what she does.

~*~

When she drags herself up the stairs to her apartment, House is waiting outside her door. He has a chair, from somewhere, and a bouncy ball too, which he's throwing repeatedly against the wall so it comes back to him. She doesn't even want to imagine the amount of complaints he's had from the neighbors; she just has to hope he didn't mention her name.

"What do you want?" she shoots without looking at him. It's not late, but she's so tired she could curl up right outside her door and go to sleep. But at the same time, she knows she won't. There's too much waiting in the shadows for her to risk closing her eyes for any longer than it takes to blink.

“I came for a slumber party!” House looks down at himself and gasps in mock surprise. “I’ve forgotten to pack my pajamas, do you mind if I sleep naked?”

Without answering him, she fumbles with the lock to her apartment. When she’s in, she tries to shut him out, but he jams his cane in the door and she’s not quite at the point where she’ll shove a cripple (and it’s almost certainly against her doctor’s oath). So she ignores him instead, flinging her bag and coat onto the couch and kicking off her shoes, pushing them under the coffee table with her foot. She’s filling the kettle with water when he hobbles into the kitchen behind her.

Cameron doesn’t turn around, even when his cane stops tapping and she can feel his breath fluttering across the top of her head. Then it’s more forceful as he deliberately blows it out of place. She reaches up her hand to fix it without even a sigh. She pours herself a tea, resisting the urge to offer House one too. He’s annoying, but he’s also the guy she’s been in love with for years, and he’s right there, in her apartment, close enough so she can feel him breathing.

“So. Are you tired of sainthood? I know you like a little walk on the wild side, you and Chase aren’t exactly subtle.”

Her cheeks burn at the thought that he and Foreman both know what she’s doing with their colleague, but she ignores the dig. “Are you really here because I wouldn’t get an old man off?”

“Well I asked Wilson if he wanted to come round and play, but his mom said no.”

Cameron grits her teeth. She really, really needs him to go away. But the more she tells him that, the more likely he is to set up camp on her couch, and she doesn’t trust him not to actually go naked. And tell everyone in the hospital about it in the morning. So she acts like he isn’t there, sipping at her tea before it’s cool enough and settling down with a folder of unsolved puzzles. He’s beside her in an instant, too close to be comfortable, too close for her to even breathe without touching him. “House,” she warns.

He swings his cane. “What are you reading?”

“Case notes,” she snaps without pointing out that he wouldn’t know what such a thing looks like. This visit doesn’t need to be any longer than he’s going to make it.

“Bor-ring,” he sings before snatching the file from her hands and tossing it across the apartment.

“House!”

“Oh don’t get your panties in a twist. I have another case, a better one.” He picks up her tea, takes a noisy sip and smacks his lips. “Irritability, sudden pallor, a need to be away from other humans and an unusually strong reaction to being asked to grant an old man’s dying wishes.”

“Lupus,” she deadpans.

“It’s never Lupus,” House replies, as if it had been a serious suggestion. “Personally I suspect our patient is a bit of a whack job.”

Cameron doesn’t justify it with a response. Not even to point out that granting people’s dying wishes isn’t her strong suit. Last time, she killed someone and the time before that the dying man was her husband. 21 and a widow. She wants to tell him that she’d rather be a whack job than a jackass, but he hasn’t quite pushed her to that level of pettiness yet. “I’m not going to play your game,” is all she says in the end.

House just shrugs. “Fine then. No games. Why did you freak out today?”

“I didn’t freak out.”

“You so did. I didn’t know if I was going to have to catch you or block a punch and being a cripple doesn’t really set you up for either.” As if to prove the point, he swings his cane again and Cameron has to duck out of the way when it flies a little too close to her face.

She shuffles over on the couch, her hands clasped too tightly around the still steaming mug of tea, wishing she were strong enough to throw House out of her apartment. But not being strong enough has always been her problem. And when she couldn’t fix herself, couldn’t be enough to help the girl inside her, she turned to everyone else, to fixing them. Even when they didn’t want her to. She takes another drink from the mug and it scorches her throat.

“Cameron?”

She rests her forehead against the mug.

“Why do you care? If it’s the puzzle then pick one. Whatever it is, you can be right.”

“What if I guess you used to be a grandpa hooker?”

The urge to throw the tea over his head is so strong that she has to grip it with all the strength she can to stop it from leaving her hands.

His hand closes around her elbow and she sets the mug down on the table, letting him take her arm until she realises what he’s looking at, then it’s too late to snatch it back, he’s already seen the long, snaking marks slashed furiously against her skin. They’re jagged, flesh ripped in some places and not in others. He knows in an instant how they got there.

“At least you didn’t sleep with the koala bear this time.”

That had been a mistake. Especially now. She remembers how he cornered her in the locker room, the anger marring his pretty face when she pushed him off. But then, hadn’t she always known he was that kind of man? He didn’t force her, of course, but a good one doesn’t sleep with a co-worker out of her mind on meth.

“Now we can add panic attacks and self injury to the list. Although that didn’t happen right away, it came later, so something else triggered it. I know you didn’t go and see grandpa again, so I’m guessing it was our friend Chase. That leaves us with a sex thing, and either a grandpa thing or a dying thing. Only if it was option number two, your primary emotion would have been guilt, but the panic attack suggests, ding ding ding, panic.”

She gets slowly and deliberately to her feet and walks towards the bathroom. She will not give him the satisfaction of anything else. His eyes follow her as she leaves, she can feel them on her back like they’re points of a laser, but he doesn’t say a word to stop her. When the door clicks shut behind her, it’s like a breath of fresh oxygen from inside a sewer. Finally, nobody can see her. Nobody can touch her.

From the corner of her eye, the glass of the mirror shimmers, but she doesn’t look at it. Instead she sits on the edge of the bath and lets her head drop into her hands, wishing she knew how to get rid of the man who won’t leave her couch. Her boss.

When she imagined him in her apartment, it wasn’t like this. She wasn’t high, either, although she considered dialing his number that night. The main reason she didn’t was because she knew he wouldn’t bite. House was many things, but when he wanted a booty call, he got himself a hooker. Like a nice, respectable gentleman. And maybe she knew, even out of her mind on meth, that she would never want them to begin like that.

Her body aches enough to curl up in the bath and just go to sleep there and then, and forget that House is right outside the door, but she doubts he’ll let her do that. If she’s not out within five minutes he’ll be bashing on the door with his cane. Just one more minute of peace, and she’ll go back out and ignore him some more. Maybe if she stands her ground he really will go away.

Right, and he’ll also open a school for war orphans.

Putting on the show of flushing the toilet and dipping her hands under the tap gives her just a few more seconds of blissful peace before she unbolts the door.

House sits there, watching it, watching her, with an expression that looks so unfamiliar on him. “I’m sorry.” The words don’t hold any high emotions, or weight. They’re plain, and simple, and true. They shift something between them that feels stronger than two fragile words.

“Do you want a coffee?”

“Finally. I thought I was going to have to declare my undying love before I got anything. Wouldn’t mind adding some scotch while you’re there, would you?” He gets another glare, but when she turns around, she lets a smile brush the corners of her lips.

For a moment, she wonders what he would do if she puts salt in his coffee, but their relationship and everything that’s happened that day makes such pranks seem like part of another universe. It will be like having a flock of geese flap through the middle of a murder scene in a horror movie. Anyway, it’d be a waste of her own coffee.

He doesn’t say thanks, she’s pretty sure the apology is the only courtesy she’s going to get out of him tonight, probably for the next year or two. It doesn’t bother her like it normally does- maybe because the memories of something so much worse are creeping in the darkest fringes of her mind, or maybe it’s just because he’s here, on her couch, and that has to mean something more than a bored boss. A nosy one, perhaps.

“You know, every cell in your body dies. They’re all replaced, around once every seven years. You don’t have the same body you did when you were five, or twelve, or eighteen.” It takes her a moment, only a moment, to figure out what he’s saying. She already knew this, of course, but here, now, like this, it means something so much more than she ever realised.

Cameron closes her eyes, wishing she had another mug of tea she could nurse, just for something to do. “I know that,” she whispers in the end. Maybe it’ll be enough.

“Hey, if you leave now in another seven years, you’ll have the wombat off you for good too.”

She giggles, actually giggles, like they’re playing truth or dare in the playground and he’s just told her to hold hands with the teacher. “Shut up, House.”

“Come on, you don’t actually like that idiot, do you?”

She shrugs. “I’ve had worse.” He’s looking at her again with the same heavy gaze he wore before she went into the bathroom. Cameron doesn’t look back.

“Your grandfather.”

A jolt runs through her, something between shock and horror, even though the truth had settled between them before that moment. In her silence, she knows he sees the hard rock her body has become. Then she feels the weight of his hand on hers and her breath catches in her throat for a different reason. She doesn't move and he squeezes her hand lightly before letting go. 

“I bet I can hit your light fitting with my cane.”

And just like that, the moment's gone, but she smiles. 

“Don’t you dare.”

“Aw, Mom.”

He pokes her with it instead, a gentle jab in her side and she whips her hand out and snatches it before he can stop her, then tosses it about six feet to her left. “Hey, no fair!” he protests, but Cameron’s struggling to hide her smirk. She’s not mean enough to leave it there, not for any length of time, but for a few moments, it’s satisfying to know she’s beaten him.

“You’ll get it back when you learn how to play nice.”

House scowls. “You should have been a kindergarten teacher.”

Only then she would never have met him, or even Foreman and Chase who might be uppity and annoying, but in a weird way they’re her friends. They’re the only other people who know what it’s like to work with House day in and day out anyway. Even Cuddy doesn’t have to answer to him. “So should you. You have such a way with children.”

Cameron leans back on the couch too, peering up at the swirls in the paintwork of the ceiling.

“I see a penis,” House says, predictably. “It looks like Chase.”

The blackness, the grime, the sludge, is still slopping somewhere in her veins- even in a different body he’s left his mark in the memories, but it’s creeping away again, banishing to the back of her mind where she doesn’t have to touch it. And House is still on her couch.

“I’m not just here for the puzzle.” He says it like he says everything, matter of fact and almost bored.

Cameron doesn't say anything. 

In the swirls, she sees dots, a curve, like the glint of a smile.

 


End file.
